The Winter Cartographer

Well, I've wanted to do pixel art for, like, 6 months now so I finally sat down and forced myself to do it. And here is about 7 hours of practice and looking up some other peoples' tips to try to break out of my own styles a bit to try out some new stuff. Think it came out okay, and hope y'all like. Also, I included the early line art of it from this morning for fun. Enjoy!

"My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People -- human beings -- this is the issue of the 20th century. People of all kinds -- all sorts of people -- and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example." - Hubert Humphrey, July 14, 1948The Heartland. Over a million square miles of rolling hills, windswept plains, and sleepy suburban towns snaking their way to glowing urban centers. Mythologized in American culture: from Fly-Over Country to Middle America, the qualities projected on the vast land between the oceans reflect as much on those doing the projecting as the land itself. And once, there was a man who made that land believe in him and won another four years in the White House off of them.How does one describe Harry S. Truman? He, like yours truly, made his way in this world without a college degree. He worked odd jobs and slept in hobo camps before later becoming an artillery officer in the First World War, a judge, and from that a Senator from Missouri. He had only met FDR twice before Roosevelt died in office and he was tasked with helping end the largest war in human history. A man whose only war experience was as an artillery lieutenant and with no formal education had to choose whether to use atomic weapons on two cities in Japan. I don't know if he made the right decision. I don't know. I wasn't there, I don't know everything, and I don't imagine he did either. He may have been, in fact, the closest a normal person's got to the Presidency in recent history, and did so right as the Cold War kicked off. The most normal President in modern history given choices about spying on American citizens, the blockade of Berlin, and how to make a policy around the use of nuclear weapons. Hell.Then came the 1948 Presidential Election. Thomas Dewey, who had run against Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 and given him a run for his money even for a popular President in wartime, was the Republican nominee and polls looked grim for Truman. Republicans had taken back Congress in 1946 for the first time since the Great Depression started, and Republicans in Congress were giving Harry a hard time. Truman's approval rating hit 36 percent and he got the nomination only because General Eisenhower refused to take it, and then came the Democratic National Convention.There, a tepid pro-civil rights plank became a more fiery acceptance of civil rights thanks to then-Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey, whose headlining speech adorns this page. Truman backed the rhetoric and attacked Republicans on cutting services, welfare, unions, and for being a "Do Nothing Congress". Cheers erupted at the convention hall for the most part, while southern delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out in protest. Not long after, coupled with Truman integrating the armed forces and the federal agencies, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond announced he'd run a campaign to the right of President Truman in the Democratic Party, calling it a campaign for States' Rights, while of course focusing mostly on the right of states to refuse civil rights reforms and keep their precious segregation and bigotry. Not to be outdone, former Vice President Henry Wallace re-formed the Progressive Party to run to Truman's left on social and labor issues. Truman's poor handling of the mass strikes of 1946 in particular was a prime example of where Wallace wanted to hit him, traveling around the country preaching a more radical vision of politics.So that's when Harry started the famous tour that likely helped save his Presidency. He took a train around the country, several thousand miles, and began holding campaign stops in every little town in the country. Most of these folks had never seen the President before; just heard him on the radio or read about him in the newspaper. Truman understood that. He understood that being able to face these people in person and deliver his message right to them from the back of a train car, he could win them over; maybe not all of them, but enough to matter. He talked to farmers, miners, laborers, and all the everyday people from coast to coast. Dewey was no slouch either, traveling around the country himself to make big speeches, but where Truman's crowds got more enthusiastic with cries of "Give 'em hell, Harry!", Dewey's got weaker. No matter the polls or the pundits, the outcome could be felt in the air. A good politician knows it, too. The way the country moves and people feel, the way the faces will look back at you and voices lift you up. You all know the famous newspaper declaring Dewey the preemptive winner, but it's hard not to believe that those truly connected to the campaigns didn't have an inkling of what was to come beforehand.In the end, Harry Truman united a strange coalition Democrats have not seen since. While Republicans under Dewey returned to their strengths in the Northeast, winning New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and so forth, Harry Truman swept much of America's Heartland, from Appalachia to the Mountain West. He is one of only two Democratic Presidents to ever win without both Pennsylvania and New York, and the only one to do it without the entire south backing him, as four states cast their votes for Strom Thurmond instead. To boot, Congress swung back for Democrats as well on Truman's coattails as 75 seats in the House of Representatives flipped in favor of his party and sent many new Republicans packing. It was a greater victory than the party could have hoped for, and set the one on coalitions and civil rights for the next half-century to come.Harry S. Truman wasn't a perfect man. I'm sure there are those reading this who don't believe he was a good man, to put it mildly. This essay is not a judgement of his moral character, but rather a simple recounting of an election unique in the 20th century, about a surprisingly ordinary man in an extraordinary office who managed to win it in a very unusual way. A Kansas City lawyer took an era and Presidency turned against him and won Flyover Country, Middle America, and Small Town USA in a way that a Democrat has not been done since, and I think that's worth a mention.

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." -Barry M. Goldwater, July 17, 1964.

The trio of Presidential elections in the 1920s are best remembered for how uneventfully overwhelming the victories were for the Republican Party, as the oft-glamorized Roaring Twenties handed Republicans three straight victories in 1920, 1924, and 1928. It's too easy to lose these three elections in the flappers, jazz, and runaway markets of the era as names like Harding, Coolidge, Davis, Cox, and so forth become trivia points (how many before today that Franklin D. Roosevelt ran as James M. Cox's running mate for Vice President in 1920, 12 years before he successfully ran for President?). 1924 is, by extension, the height of electoral anonymity, featuring a President best known for saying as few words as possible and two other candidates largely passed into history except for those of us, such as yours truly, with a vested interest in the subject.

But every election as big as President matters to the people at the time, and their effects ring out long after the candidates and figures have been forgotten.

In 1924, Calvin Coolidge and the Republican Party had returned to a height of power lost during the Wilsonian years but gained following the end of the First World War and the small recession resulting from it. The economy was improving rapidly, the average American's lifestyle was climbing higher, and the Democratic Party was on the retreat. Even after the Teapot Dome scandal under President Harding, the Republicans had recovered in part due to the President's death and thus the assumption of the Presidency by Coolidge. But within, the party and the country itself broiled with conflict.

Race riots, bombings, and lynchings were still common in the 1920s as the Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence under new the new leadership of William J. Simmons following the 1915 release of Birth of a Nation (helpfully screened in the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, the fucker), and by 1924 reached a membership peak of 1.5 to 4 million members, between 4 and 15% of the eligible population. Besides being anti-black in their bigotry, the Klan focused on anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-Communist, and anti-immigrant campaigns as well as those who pushed against Prohibition and for the sexual openness that the Roaring Twenties are known for today. In 1921, not long before this election, a mass anti-black mob stormed "black wall street" in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and burned it down to the point of using airplanes to drop bombs on the district below. Recorded deaths were 36 with 183 serious injuries, but exact figures are unknown.

Former liberal Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge reacted with weakness. He let his secretary remove black Republican leaders in the south appointed by the President, for they were not able to be elected due to the corruption of the southern states, in the hopes of winning over white southern voters, and his platform did not condemn the Ku Klux Klan despite calls from his party to do so. While Coolidge had spoken positively on equal rights for black Americans and signed the right of citizenship for Native Americans on reservations that year, his actual policy fell far short at a time when it was most needed and the country was sharply divided.

The Democrats did no better. John W. Davis, while at least condemning the KKK on the campaign trail in 1924 (more than Coolidge did, notably), was a Democrat in favor of poll taxes and against federal lynching laws in his time as a representative from West Virginia, and would even attempt to defend separate but equal school policy as a lawyer well into the 1950s. The Democrats who had won great swaths of the north and even notable black political thinkers and leaders in 1912 had been chased back to the south.

And, thus, cowardice. The KKK was at its height, the Democrats could not agree to even lightly condemn them besides Davis himself—who policy-wise didn't act as a friend to those the Klan targeted—and Coolidge took the opportunity to stand for nothing and put out no risk for any reward. And why not, int he end? He won in a landslide, and very likely would have anyway. Northerners were not swayed by Davis' lightening of his campaign rhetoric and for all of Coolidge's conservatism on the subject, much of the south swung back to Democrats from 1920. Frustration over the Republicans and Democrats on their conservatism and refusal to adopt more party-wide platforms helped fuel the candidacy of Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and discontent swelled within the ranks of each party.

And we come back again to the future. What we do in the moment ripples outwards and effects far from where we see. Perhaps Coolidge taking a harder stance on race and other civil rights of the day wouldn't have done much or even lost him the election, but we do know what happened when he didn't. In 1932, after 4 years under Republican President Herbert Hoover, the country turned massively to the Democrats under Franklin D. Roosevelt and his economic system to get them out of the Great Depression. But more than that, black Americans began voting for Democrats in larger numbers than seen before, as economic interest can, at times, come first.

This, in turn, helped lead to the 1948 Democratic National Convention in which Hubert H. Humphrey, then Mayor of Minneapolis and later Senator-turned-Presidential candidate, urged the Democratic Party to "get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." Sixteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law and, a year later, signed the Voting Rights Act even as southern Democrats left the party in protest or voted against the party.

If the Republican Party, at the height of its power in the Roaring Twenties and in a deeply divided country in which to be in the north was to be Republican and to be in the south was to be Democrat, had taken a harder stance on civil rights and economic interests for black Americans, perhaps the sides would be flipped today. We won't ever know, but 1924 can't help but live on as missed opportunities, as more progressive party platforms missed by single votes.

What of, then, Robert La Follette and his Progressive Party? Was it all a waste? For that, I don't think I could say yes. While he managed to win only one state, La Follette's Presidential candidacy exposed a sore in the side of both the Republican and Democratic Parties with progressive voters who desired change and new movements beyond the conservative party platforms and leaders who continued to move the big two down the road towards the Great Depression. La Follette's candidacy brought about a great alliance of socialists, union members, farmers, urban laborers, and all other sorts of progressives and those who wanted change on a ticket with former Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler that helped drive home the bipartisanship of his candidacy. These alliances would prove harder to break than the party itself, and persist even after the death of Robert La Follette Sr., in 1925.

The Progressive Party of Wisconsin would continue to be a dominant force in Wisconsin throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s until eventually fading back into the Republican Party there. Burton K. Wheeler, like Robert La Follette, Jr. and California Progressive politician Hiram Johnson. And to this day, the Secretary of State of Wisconsin, since 1982, is Douglas J. La Follette, a descendant of Robert. The alliances that La Follette's run were built on, often between farmers and labor unions, continued in state parties such as the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota and the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota. The North Dakota Mill and Elevator and the Bank of North Dakota founded by the Nonpartisan League continue to operate today, and the Nonpartisan League was joined with North Dakota's Democratic Party to form the North Dakota Democratic–Nonpartisan League Party, which operates to this day. In Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party had a larger hand in state politics for decades before joining the Democratic party in the 1940s to form the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, which similarly still operates, with control of the state house, both Senate seats, the Governorship, and all other executive office at the time of this writing in April 2019.

1924 was a boring Presidential election to look back at and read about in a vacuum, but the effects it had stay with us today, and the choices made then could have easily changed the world we have now. We cannot afford to forget what choices were not made and paths not taken as much as those that were which arrived us at the world we have now if we are to make better ones and arrive at a brighter future.

"Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through — and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best." -Theodore Roosevelt, October 14, 1912.

The 1912 Presidential Election is what happens when a titanic clash of ego and political power clash all together in a tumultuous time and have enough effects to still be felt 106 years and some change later. It is unfathomable how many lives would be changed today had the war hawk Roosevelt been elected over the isolationist Wilson (except when it came to Latin America, of course, with the authorization of interventions in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Honduras, and Nicaragua) when the First World War broke out in Europe two years later in 1914. American finance without Wilson's Federal Reserve would likely look very different today, and the Supreme Court appointments that affected Franklin Roosevelt in his time may have been changed as well, and with it the entire structure of the New Deal.

What's more than that, however, is the whimsy often surrounding the 1912 Presidential election and how it is taught, if ever mentioned. If the average person is familiar with it, it's likely through Roosevelt's famous Bull Moose quote above, and his reputation that came from it. Roosevelt was a character, an All-American of the highest order who became something of an internet meme a decade or so ago for his legendary badassness. It is far too easy to ignore Roosevelt's bullying Colombia out of Panama in order to get the Panama Canal for the United States (and when several US newspapers later accused Roosevelt of pursuing a canal in Panama and not Nicaragua due to funding from the French, he sued them for libel), or his belief that he could authorize sending Marines to Cuba to put down insurrection there without the authorization of Congress.

Then there is the Philippines-American War, which has quite a point in the 1912 Presidential Election. It's a war in which the United States systemically employed torture (as found in a report by the Commanding General of the U.S. Army) and in the end resulted in a death toll estimated at 250,000 to 750,000 for civilians. The war, which lasted from 1898 to 1902, was finished up by Roosevelt himself as the President lionized American soldiers even as Americans at home, such as Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan, protested. The Governor-General of the Philippines from 1901-1903 during the latter half of the war? William Howard Taft, later President and Republican nominee in 1912.

When the two former friends would clash in the 1912 Republican Primaries (a first for parties and a Progressive reform from that wing of the party), Taft came away with the Republican nomination due to the new system as well as Robert M. LaFollette Sr., refusing to release his delegates to Roosevelt in hopes of getting the nomination for himself out of a contested convention. Not content to sit idly by with reforms on his mind, Roosevelt took his wing of the party and formed the Progressive Party and ably handed the election to Woodrow Wilson in an electoral vote—if not popular vote—landslide.

But who was Woodrow Wilson? To history books, a studious New Jersey Governor who replaced boisterous politicians with a scholarly approach to politics who had big ideas and strong ideals. To reality, he was a nightmare for racial progress in the United States and helped strengthen segregation for years to come, particularly in the south when his tenure pushed back progress already made. And no, this is not some bullshit about "everyone was a racist back then", Wilson was particularly racist for 1912. In 1913, pro-civil rights journalist Oswald Garrison Villard wrote that the Wilson administration "has allied itself with the forces of reaction, and put itself on the side of every torturer, of every oppressor, of every perpetrator of racial injustice in the South or the North." Those few black government employees who could not be fired were put into literal cages to separate them from their white employees who just years earlier they had worked with side by side under Taft and Roosevelt. Wilson was not a product of his time, but a step back for it and we dishonor the people who fought him tooth and nail to assume everyone then agreed with such despicable acts.

So where does that leave the 1912 Presidential Election? Shouldn't I talk about the facts and figures and the primaries and all of that? I could, certainly, but political history isn't just lining up what percent in what county a candidate got, it's about who ran and why. The 1912 Presidential Election is not just interesting because it is data about a race with 4 major candidates: it is interesting because it's a race featuring two candidates connected to a war involving war crimes and torture as well as imperialism while pushing for domestic progressivism against another candidate who pushed for progressivism for white men and taking steps back on racial progress for all others who then also engaged in imperialism in Central America. Then throw in Eugene V. Debs, an angry and passionate socialist fighter for unions and strikers who was jailed twice for his beliefs and that's what makes an election matter. It's about people and the effects they have on all of us, not cool stories or little snippets to put at the top of an article summary; that's all a lot of bull mooseshit.

The 1992 Presidential Election

"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south." -Ross Perot, Reform Party Candidate for President, October 15, 1992

1. Change vs. more of the same
2. The economy, stupid
3. Don't forget health care

Under those three guidelines, particular the now-famous slogan of "the economy, stupid", William Jefferson Clinton, Bill to supporters and Slick Willy to detractors, overcame a year of instability and change to unseat a sitting President and become the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter had himself been unseated in 1980 by Ronald Reagan. It was a moment not lost on a battered Democratic Party, who had endured years of their own party members voting in line with Reagan and Bush after him, only one Presidential election victory from 1968 through 1988, and watching as Ronald Reagan's cabinet full gurgling over with blood and miasma had been pardoned by the well-liked George Bush. Bush, the same who had then led the United States into the most popular war since the Second World War—even if leaving the Kurds and others to die by Saddam's hand in Iraq only made a later confrontation worse, but the voices raising the point were few in 1991—and saw the fall of the USSR and Eastern Bloc under his tenure.The average bystander in late 1991 through early 1992 would have been forgiven for thinking Bush was a shoe-in for re-election, and the refusal of Democratic titans like Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo would have only confirmed that idea. But 1992 was not a normal year, nor one with normal candidates or a normal world anymore. Normal was the Cold War, Capitalism opposed to Communism, a world on the brink of nuclear war seemingly all the time, and then suddenly it...wasn't. Because then it was, well, it was—

Like, fuck, guys. That's a lot. Because screw the academic writing for a little bit, alright? I'm a 90s kid; all I ever knew was President Clinton and an economy that was decent and living in a little bubble that every kid had. The 90s are flashes of TV and music and video games and school to me. It's too easy, sometimes, for us to look back at it like that as people like, like us as I suspect a lot of people reading this are similar, and forget what it was like then. Because forget about the election for a moment, alright?

1992. Unemployment was the highest it'd been in a decade, the Cold War was over and Yugoslavia was ripping itself apart like a meat grinder. In Los Angeles the L.A. Riots consumed the city in anger at racial injustice and then just at one another while Rodney King, whose beating began the whole thing in the first place, begged everyone to just get along. AIDS was still burning through the gay community and the government treated them, treated us like fucking trash. The NAMES Project, a massive memorial quilt for the victims of AIDS/HIV, was displayed in Washington D.C. every year starting in 1987, because for a lot of people who died, that was their funeral while their families turned their back. Meanwhile Pat Buchanan was talking about a war on religion and scaring people up, and starting the polarization that we "enjoy" today. People worried about their jobs disappearing overseas and the imminent signing of NAFTA, while every workplace steadily got more digital. Stability was a luxury that we afford ourselves looking back on it because we just couldn't understand it, those of us too young, or who remember but choose to pick only the good and leave the bad.

People tried to make a difference in their own ways. Bush ran on standing with the President and said the worst of the recession was over. Clinton ran as a new kind of Democrat, one that he said was going to need people to put effort into getting benefits and entitlements in a more centrist position closer to what we'd call neoliberalism now. Ross Perot ran on beating the three party system and changing the budget and keeping jobs in the country. One of them won the Presidency. Ordinary people worked to make things better whose names we'll never learn, to give us a world better than the world they were stuck in. Did we win?

I don't know. I still don't. Maybe you do. More factory jobs left the country. Health care wasn't reformed and became the nightmare it is today of diabetic people begging for their lives on GoFundMe to buy insulin. The economy boomed for a time, but ended up raising inequality for those who couldn't catch up with it. Those who benefited from it in the short term were kneecapped when the bubble burst in the early 2000s or smashed in the face when 2008 and the Great Recession came.

I Don't Know, Do You?
Writing about Presidential elections is hard. You can write about facts and figures and be super objective, or you can get angry and pick a side and make heroes out of someone and write it like it's some heroic struggle. But what the fuck do I do here? Clinton won, but he and the Democrats signed on to welfare reform that only made the divide between rich and poor worse, and crime bills that filled our jails further with people who don't fucking deserve to be there for so long or on such trumped up charges. But the guy he ran against pardoned people who were partly responsible for genocide in Central America. How the fuck do I write about that?

I guess this is how. You decide for yourself, reader, what you make of it all. You make of the world what you want it to be. That's all we could do then, that's all we can do now. Elections are easy to make sense of, but the world is harder, and every one of you who is figuring it out for themselves is so brave. Just like everyone who made their own way, little by little, in 92 while the whole world overturned around them, you can do it too. I believe in ya.

The 1968 Presidential Election

"...I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office — the Presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." -President Lyndon Baines Johnson, March 31, 1968

Hate. Anger. Death. Nineteen Sixty-Eight raged on as an all-consuming fire that ate up what was left of the American consensus which had elected President Johnson four years earlier and spat it out on the side of the road like so much trash. The Democratic Party? At war with itself over race, over left versus center, and most importantly over Vietnam as history's favorite what if, Robert F. Kennedy, lay dead. The Republicans? A smoking cinder upon which Richard Nixon sat as king of the ashes while his allies, chief among them Ronald Reagan, both clamored for attention and sought to surpass him at every turn. The sons of bitches always had, but the old Orthogonian had finally come out on top.

Blood ran riot in American cities, in what seemed like a never-ending stream since Watts shortly after LBJ's election. In Chicago, Democratic Mayor Daley called in the police to beat other Democrats and pleaded with President Johnson to run for President. He refused. Humphrey promised change and more of a world of tomorrow, the same which ever paper in the press, every program on the television, every intellectual in the country had seen sure of a bare 48 months ago. Nixon promised to stop ghoulish procession on every living room television night after night that caused white families to hold their children close in fear. Caused white suburbs to erect walls around themselves. No busing, no integration, none of your kind here.

When the ideologies met, thrown together in a pot with the intense racism and hate of Alabama Governor George Wallace, a corrosive toadfucker whose very presence on this website rottens and poisons it even as he burns in hell to this very day, it brought the country to a boil. It was an environment in which only Richard Milhous Nixon could prosper. His strength hammered the Democratic coalition and broke through the South where Barry Goldwater had weakened it: he understood how to speak to the white men of the working classes and middle classes both to break through.

The election was tough. Too often obscured by history, Hubert. H. Humphrey almost equaled Nixon's vote as great masses of Americans chose to vote against Nixon's promises and showmanship--honed working a carnival as a youngster--and for change, but as I bet a lot of you found out in November of 2016, it doesn't really matter how close the popular vote total is when it comes to choosing Presidents. Richard Nixon pounded his message home in enough states to scrape by and win a large electoral vote victory and crown himself King, for that's what it would be to a man committing treason on the campaign trail and repeatedly in office until forced out for an entirely different set of crimes.

But that's history for you. Nineteen Sixty-Eight realigned the country politically and we've felt it ever since. Nixon cut the Gordian Knot of the Democratic Party's war between northern liberals and Dixiecrats by giving southerners an out and getting them to start voting Republican; which they've been doing with only a little exception since at the Presidential level. Humphrey, as well as the primary campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, helped cement a more leftward faction of the party which has continued to grow since.

Ultimately, LBJ's Great Society programs would survive, but not without repeated threats down the line as race-based politics only continued as dreams of a great societal integration were never quite carried out. Nixon united his silent majority for a time, but swells of protests and daily bombings, not even to mention strings of robberies and increases of murders around the nation, do little to sway future historians towards the idea that Nixon's election solved the crises he was elected to fix. Even the appointment of very pro-integration George Romney to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development saw few of his ideas fully implemented, and Romney left shortly after Nixon's reelection.

And that, perhaps, is the ultimate legacy of Nineteen Sixty-Eight: a year of unrealized potential and unfulfilled promises built on the back of hate and anger the likes of which we may only pray we do not see again.

2008 Democratic Presidential Primary

Hello again, everyone!

As the 2020 Democratic Primary field continues to grow, I felt it would be useful to take a look at one more recent Democratic Presidential Primary for insight into how this large field might turn out, as it is one that is shaping out to be equally hard-fought and contentious.

The 2008 Primary, which shaped into a battle of titans between then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and then-Senator Hillary of New York, was one of the closest in the modern era and came down to the wire as each candidate's respective campaigns came down to the wire in attempts to win over the divided Democratic electorate and succeed President George W. Bush. The primary was tumultuous as events, oft forgotten now by younger Democrats, served to make one campaign feel advantaged over another; infamously, for example, the Democratic National Committee initially stripped Florida and Michigan—states which Clinton won—of their delegates for moving their primary dates into January to be held early along with the usual early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. Those delegates were later partially restored, but not without hurt feelings and accusations.

The 2008 Primary also held a very special Super Tuesday on February 5, 2008, called among other things "Tsunami Tuesday", which featured the largest simultaneous number of state caucuses and primaries ever held in Presidential Primary history. Twenty-four states as well as American Samoa held them together, and Democrats Abroad beginning their week-long process, combining for 52% of all Democratic delegates being given out on that day. It was an event that massively changed the shape not just of that primary but of all primaries since, as Super Tuesday has continued to grow in importance.

With 2020 now on the horizon, and with Super Tuesday 2020 featuring California and North Carolina now after moving there since 2016, it seems as if the lessons learned from 2008 may serve those watching the next Democratic Primary well. Will the 2020 Primary turn out similarly to 2008 or take its own path and turns? It's unknown for now we may wish to look to the lessons of the past to prepare for the future.